Picture a juggler at a carnival. She tosses a tangerine into the air, lets it fly in lazy circles from hand to hand, again and again. Then she tosses a second tangerine into the air and juggles it, too. Then a third, and a fourth. Perhaps the fifth addition isn’t a tangerine at all but an apple, and the sixth is a pear, and your eyes watch the flash of color as the fruit spin in the air. She keeps catching them deftly. As she adds the seventh fruit—an avocado—to the mix, she changes the path of the juggled fruit from a circle to a figure 8. You catch your breath. She adds another avocado, then, unexpectedly, a golf ball, something still spherical but clearly inedible. As the juggling gets more and more complex—while also still satisfying in the regularity of its pattern of movement (that is, in the predictability of the circle or the figure 8, though perhaps the juggler keeps shifting back and forth between the two)—your attention is held riveted. You are waiting for the moment when she will miss a beat and all the fruit will come crashing down to roll away from her feet. Or for the moment when she will maintain the perfect figure 8 with twelve fruit for an entire minute before catching them all in a bag and taking a bow. You don’t know which will happen. Perhaps she fakes a stumble but doesn’t drop any fruit. She keeps you guessing. Perhaps, at the end, after dropping all the other juggled items back into her bag, she will hold the golf ball last and will take a big bite out of it, revealing that it was actually a candy (and edible) all along—an epilogue performed with full cheeks and a cheeky grin.
Each time she added a fruit, she was upping the ante. And you could guess but not flawlessly predict which fruit she’d add. Sometimes, she’d surprise you entirely by adding something fruit-shaped that was not a fruit, only to reveal later that it really was a fruit all along. And you really didn’t know until the end just how far she would go. How far would she push the juggling act? How many fruit? How many times would she switch back and forth from circular to figure-8 juggling? An expert storyteller, like an expert carnival juggler, is a master of pacing and a master at upping the ante.
In your fiction, add ingredients to the story’s conflict, and then keep adding them—while keeping them all in motion, all moving and brought continuously into the reader’s view, juggled for the reader’s delight—until the moment when secrets are revealed, conflicts are brought to a head, and the fruit all crashes either to the floor of the stage or neatly into the bag. You can up the ante comically or tragically or romantically, but it’s the same technique, regardless of the mood.
How many ingredients do you add? The precise number that you can successfully juggle for the reader’s delight (and yours) without fumbling—that’s how many.
Of all my toolkits, I might have enjoyed writing this new book on pacing the most, so far. (Unless I enjoyed writing the book on worldbuilding more, which I confess is possible. That was five years ago, and I can’t be sure.) I am excited to share this class-in-a-book with all of you. Come master the craft of suspense, tension, and revelation – or, put another way, the art of surprising your reader and keeping them surprised: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1736212761
Lovecraft and Borges, in a twin pair of riveting tales, suggest opposite ways to encounter what appears different to us: with fear … or with curiosity. Which will we choose?
A man visits a mansion on the top of a hill. He has not been invited, but he finds the door unlocked. For an instant, he hesitates at the doorstep. His friends in Buenos Aires have told him there is a new resident in the great house in the country, a resident no one has seen, though strange sounds and lights come from the house at night. But it is raining torrents, and that decides him; swiftly, he ducks inside the house.
Once inside, passing from one room to the next, he begins to tremble. Nothing he sees makes sense. There is furniture, but he can’t describe it. An armchair implies a human body, but these furnishings imply things he cannot imagine. It is quiet in the house, except for the wild lashing of the rain against the windows. He becomes increasingly certain that the new resident—whom he assumes is out—has not moved here from some other earthly home. The resident is alien.
At last, shaking from revulsion and horror, he enters a last room up a long ramp and discovers inside it something with a recognizable shape: a ladder! He is relieved. Here, at last, is something he understands. He grips the rungs and scampers up, only to find himself entering an upper story whose furnishings are more alien even than those below. Shivering, he wonders:
What must the inhabitant of this house be like? What must it be seeking here, on this planet, which must have been no less horrible to it than it to us? From what secret regions of astronomy or time, from what ancient and now incalculable twilight, had it reached this South American suburb and this precise night?
— Jorge Luis Borges
With a start, he realizes suddenly that the rain has stopped; droplets still cling to the window panes, but there is utter silence. Glancing at his watch, he realizes it is 2 a.m., as if he has spent hours exploring and lost in thought, or as if time operates differently inside the house than outside it. He resolves to leave, quickly, before the unseen inhabitant can return. Hardly daring to breathe, he hurries back down the ladder to the rooms below. At that point in the story, Jorge Luis Borges ends his fiction “There Are More Things”:
My feet were just touching the next to last rung when I heard something coming up the ramp—something heavy and slow and plural. Curiosity got the better of fear, and I did not close my eyes.
— Jorge Luis Borges
“I did not close my eyes”
This is one of my favorite science fiction stories, because of that final line: I did not close my eyes. To me, that is the essence and function of speculative fiction. The best science fiction and fantasy confronts us with characters or apparitions that appear to us to be monsters or marvels and then whispers to us, Do not close your eyes. All our lives, so many of us flee from encounters with difference. Speculative fiction invites the encounter, welcomes it, sometimes with a shiver, sometimes with delight, sometimes just with a spirit of wild adventure and the embracing of unforeseen possibilities.
Borges’ title, “There Are More Things,” is from a line in Hamlet, when the Prince of Denmark tells his skeptical friend Horatio, upon encountering a spirit that might be his father’s Ghost:
There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
— Hamlet
What is one to do when one encounters a marvel, when the unexpected invades one’s philosophy, one’s preconceptions and biases, one’s perspective on life and community and the world, coming on unasked, uninvited, like a shock? As the Ghost approaches in its chains, many of the soldiers of Denmark quail and fall back and wish to flee. Hamlet does not. Whether the Ghost will present him with “aught of woe or wonder,” he will speak to it. He will face the Ghost. He will not close his eyes.
Fear or wonder?
Woe or wonder: these are two reactions human beings can have to the encounter with the unexpected and the strange. Fear or wonder. In real life, when you run into something or someone who is different from you, someone who speaks differently or believes differently or looks different, or a place or culture or organism you don’t fully understand, you have a mix of instinctive responses. You have a mix of wonder and fear. One of those two reactions is going to take priority.
If fear takes priority, you are driven to increase the distance between you and what’s different from you. There are different ways to seek or enforce such distance. You can pick up an axe and smash the other who frightens you in the head. You can run away. You can freeze in stark terror, like a character in a weird fiction tale confronted by a mass of tentacles and eyeballs slithering near. Or you can take what’s different and put it in a cage, confine it and control it so that it stays where you want it while you move about. That’s the fear response.
But fear is not the only response to the strange and unexpected other. The hero of Borges’ tale does not close his eyes, does not flee and hide; he faces the being who is coming up the ramp, accepting the encounter and the offer of adventure that it implies. Hamlet rushes out into the dark forest to speak with the Ghost, his wonder and his curiosity overpowering all fear. Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, says that wonder is the beginning of all knowledge, all science, all knowing, because wonder provokes us to draw near rather than away, to give ourselves to the marvelous encounter. To ask questions. You and I, we are human. It is ours to wonder at the world and at each other, not to cower and tremble and fear.
Children know this, I think. While they are still small enough, everything seems to them a wonder, something to draw near and touch. It is only by our wounds, by the lick of flame at our fingers or the bite of a wild creature, or the tumble down the scree where we were seeking to pull out a brightly colored rock—it is only by our pain that we learn fear. Fear is not our natural condition. Consider this passage that I read as a youth, in Mary Renault’s beautiful novel, The King Must Die. In it, young Theseus, as a boy of seven, catches sight of the most magnificent horse:
Poseidon, as I knew, can look like a man or like a horse, whichever he chooses. In his man shape, it was said, he had begotten me. But there were songs in which he had horse sons too, swift as the north wind, and immortal. The King Horse, who was his own, must surely be one of these. It seemed clear to me, therefore, that we ought to meet. I had heard he was only five years old. “So,” I thought, “though he is the bigger, I am the elder. It is for me to speak first.”
…Then I saw him, standing by himself on a little knoll, watching the end of the pasture where they were choosing colts. I went nearer, thinking, as every child thinks once for the first time, “Here is beauty.”
He had heard me, and turned to look. I held out my hand, as I did in the stables, and called, “Son of Poseidon!” On this he came trotting up to me, just as the stable horses did. I had brought a lump of salt, and held it out to him.
There was some commotion behind me. The groom bawled out, and looking round I saw the Horse Master beating him. My turn would be next, I thought; men were waving at me from the railings, and cursing each other. I felt safer where I was. The King Horse was so near that I could see the lashes of his dark eyes. His forelock fell between them like a white waterfall between shining stones. His teeth were as big as ivory plates upon a war helm; but his lip, when he licked the salt out of my palm, felt softer than my mother’s breast. When the salt was finished, he brushed my cheek with his, and snuffed at my hair. Then he trotted back to his hillock, whisking his long tail. His feet, with which as I learned later he had killed a mountain lion, sounded neat on the meadow, like a dancer’s.
— Mary Renault, The King Must Die
As children, we want to see the King Horse. We want to stand beside him and feel his breath warm on our cheek, feel him lick the salt from our hand, and laugh as he dances over the grass. Fear is not our natural condition. Nor is it unnecessary; the function of fear is to keep us safe. But fear is a survival mechanism, and where our very survival is not at stake, it has no place. Where our survival is not at stake, our response can be wonder. That is what we forget when we get a little older than Theseus at the stable. It is a thing that we could unforget.
That is what Borges writes into the end of his story. Dedicated “to the memory of H. P. Lovecraft,” the story also serves as a colleague’s gentle rebuke of Lovecraft. Borges seems to say, Like you, my friend, I, too, can imagine cosmic horrors, strange life that fits no earthly shape. Yet I have enough imagination to consider that our planet would be, at first glance, “no less horrible to it than it to us.” I have enough imagination to consider that there might be conversation between minds that appear at first glance incompatible. I imagine that this creature has occupied a human house; I could choose to regard it as cuckoo in the nest or as invader in the homeland, but I could also choose to regard it as a guest, one seeking welcome, one seeking to know us, one setting aside its own fear and horror in order to draw close and look us in the eye. Lovecraft, for all the grandeur and wild beauty of your fiction, your tales of cosmic horror and woe deny their characters and their readers the gift of choice. Faced with difference, you were able to imagine only flight, only fear. I will choose to imagine wonder. Faced with difference, I choose not to close my eyes.
The gift of wonder
Stories give us opportunities to explore our instinctive responses to the other; vicariously, we discover opportunities to either welcome or reject the marvelous encounter with the other. Which we choose is then a matter of how limited or expansive our imagination might be. Like Lovecraft, we might stop at fear, or like Borges, we might hold all possibilities in magnificent tension, open our eyes, and say, Well met by moonlight, stranger.
That is a gift—one of seven gifts that speculative fiction has for us in this dark hour. Often sold at bookstores as “science fiction and fantasy,” sometimes as horror, sometimes snuck into the shelves of “literary” fiction, speculative fiction simply means wonder stories. Fiction that speculates, that asks improbable questions, that indulges curiosity, that climbs back down the ladder to look at the strange thing that is approaching from behind, to face it without fear, to face it like Theseus facing the King Horse, holding out a lump of salt. These are the stories we need right now, and I want to talk with you about why, and what healing and opening of our hearts and imaginations might be possible if we allow it. We live in a time when we are being asked to accept stories told by people whose hearts are famished and grinchlike, stories that make us smaller; we are in such need of stories that make us bigger, stories that empower us to imagine larger worlds than the cages we have been constructing for ourselves. Stories that help us imagine that the fence between us and the King Horse is no insurmountable barrier, and that all the fences and all the walls between us and our many kindred on this earth are unworthy of our respect, that we needn’t heed them, that it is better to break them, or tumble them, or clamber over them with a lump of salt in our hand or a canteen of water, with a blanket to offer warmth, with ears ready to hear another’s story.
As I write this [in 2020], we are enduring the long night. Our people are ill and dying of a new disease. Our societies, at home and abroad, are beset by fascism—a shadow that, like Sauron’s in Mordor, has found new opportunity to take shape and grow again. Climate change sends devastating heat waves, forest fires, and hurricanes to our shores. At every hour, faces on television and voices on Twitter are telling us to fear, fear, fear, like the drumbeat of our heart going too fast. And tragically, because death or extinction is too terrifying, because disease and ecological disaster are too frightful, we turn our fears on each other instead. Those others, they are what we must fear, our leaders and too many of our storytellers insist.
Against that drumbeat of fear, I write this book—as a love letter to science fiction and fantasy and as a letter of hope to you, dear readers, and I am writing it in 2020. It has been a long night. A cold night. I am in search of stories to warm us, eager to share stories that warm us. How we make it through this long night together will be dependent on the stories we tell and the stories we are willing to hear. Facing each other across the fire with our backs to the long dark, we need to share and hear wonder stories. And we need to hear them well, understanding the gifts of hope tucked inside these tales like trinkets or treasures tucked inside nested Russian dolls. Here, I’ll show you what I mean. Come closer to the fire. Let’s talk. Let me share with you these gifts.
Writers: Please join me, and spread the word! This April, hosted by Scribophile, I will be teaching a four-week online intensive course on character development, Write Characters Your Readers Won’t Forget, based on my acclaimed Toolkits for Fiction Writers. The final week of the course will include intensive workshopping of your character arc by me and by your peers. It’s going to be a unique learning experience, and you will leave having transformed the way you approach developing and discovering your fictional characters! Find out more here.
Get personal feedback on your characters. Be able to bring your characters to high-stakes choices, and involve your readers in the emotion and tension of those choices. Learn how to tighten your pacing and plotting, identify where you’ve left gaps, where you’ve taken too long, and where there are additional opportunities for both nuance and suspense in your character’s journey as they struggle to become (or remain) who they need to be. Create characters your readers will never forget.
The Apostle John, one of the fathers of the early church, described the man who sees others in his community suffering and in need and then turns away as one who “clenches up his bowels” (κλείσῃ τὰ σπλάγχνα αὐτοῦ). We render this in English as “closes his heart” (1 John 3:17). In the ancient world, though, the seat of the emotions was τὰ σπλάγχνα, ta splagchna, the viscera, the guts, that place where you feel ill when you’re doing wrong. The man who turns away from others who “have need” shuts up his guts.
A bit sadly, John then asks, “How can the love of God remain in him?”
Quite literally, such a man is so full of shit that though he says, “I know God, I love God,” there is no room for love of God inside him. He’s constipated. He’s clenched up. He’s stiffly full of his own refuse, and there’s no room left either for love of God or love of one another. Unless, like the Shulammite in The Song of Songs, he allows his “bowels to be moved” by the presence of the Beloved, he may well continue to walk through life straight as a stick and desperately, painfully constipated, wreaking his discomfort and misery on others as he goes.
But John says he can only love God if he also loves others, if he unclenches and loves those in need, “not in thoughts and in talking but in work and in unforgetting.” It is utterly impossible, according to John, for you to be a godly person and fail to respond to those in need. He who forgets his neighbor forgets God. Such a person might insist he loves God and loves Christ, but according to John, he is a liar.
He is a pseustes, a ‘fake.’ A phony. A liar to others, a liar to God, possibly a liar to himself. You can have a society where people talk about devotion and obedience to God all the time but if people are suffering and their suffering is ignored by those talking about Jesus, John, one of the founders of the Christian church, says that we Godtalkers are liars and full of shit. (Forgive my coarseness here, but John is very direct, and at times the Greek is a bit earthier than we prefer our sanitized English to be.)
John is very concerned with truth. It’s important to him, incredibly so, as it was to all the apostolic writers. And truth, for them, was a matter of continually unforgetting Christ (both his presence and his promises) and one another: that is necessary to keep the greatest entole, the entole of Christ. We translate that word as “commandment” in English. It literally means an “in-the-end.” I would be tempted to translate it “purpose.” For John and his colleagues, it is the purpose, the greatest purpose, the purpose he urges us to keep and hold to: love God, love one another.
This has been your evening meditation on bowel movements, the Bible, and caring for those who suffer and have need.
Stant Litore
P.S. Also, please get the book: Lives of Unforgetting: What We Lose in Translation When We Read the Bible – I do not recall that I discuss bowel movements in it, but I discuss many other things that may fascinate, delight, trouble, or move you. May this book aid in the unclenching of our guts.
P.P.S. If you have been loving my work, whether the fiction or the nonfiction, please come support my work on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/stantlitore. A membership at a very small amount gets you a lot of great reads, and it helps me do more of this. The stories we tell are how we weave peace, and I hope mine will do a small part in that. Come join me. I could use the help, and you could use the stories.
I can’t keep up with the terms treated as pejoratives and applied by some readers to any novel that doesn’t have a white/male/straight enough cast. I guess “woke” is the new “snowflake,” like “snowflake” was the new “SJW,” like “SJW” was the new “politically correct”?
Ok, sure.
I remember that back in 2014, some readers were appalled (appalled, Stant, appalled!) that I had “suddenly” become a “raving SJW.” My response was, “Dude, the term ‘social justice’ literally appeared in the first sentence of my first novel, which was also literally about how a zombie epidemic started when a nation didn’t care for its own and left its most vulnerable starving in the streets or sacrificed them for the comfort of the most powerful.” I just write what moves me; the lens you bring with you to these stories is on you.
The misapplication of these terms is so goofy, anyway. I’m not a warrior; I’m a storyteller and sometimes a teacher. I’ve marched in protests and argued with congresspeople, but I have never been to war.
I’m very politically incorrect, because I am not at all content with the state of my nation’s politics, nor my town’s, and I don’t really care if a reader is offended, I care if they’re moved.
I still don’t have a clue to this day what being a snowflake means. The people who throw the term around the most seem to be constantly offended by everyone and everything, and have the most fragile egos I’ve ever encountered. I grew up in the Cascades, and snowflakes were silent and intricate and big as my thumb, and those and the ice crystals under the soil that cracked when I walked and the cries of newborn kids (I mean dairy goats) on February nights were the indescribable beauties of winter, and a hush falls over my soul when I remember, so that it is impossible for me to take ‘snowflake’ seriously as a pejorative term. I have rarely seen anything as beautiful as the snowflakes of the 1980s in the mountains before the world got so dang hot.
And being a white barbarian of the early twenty-first century dystopia and the descendant of slavers, it would be absurd to call myself woke (as any future historian will tell you), but I am trying to blink the encrustation of sleep out of my eyes to the extent that I know how to. I want to learn and think and listen to others’ stories and play with dinosaurs and make up new stories, because those are the things I loved doing as a child, and I still do. I care if people hurt or are in danger. I don’t understand how you can love stories and not care when people are in danger. But yeah, you do you.
I suppose if any of the readers who were appalled in 2014 read this post, they’d call it virtue signaling, but I didn’t start writing this post to signal virtue but to express annoyance and amusement. And then, because I’m a writer, I got distracted trying to tell you how ethereal and beautiful snowflakes used to be, less than a thousand feet above sea level, when I was a boy. When no one cared if I wrote about two girls who grew up and got married and rode dinosaurs, and when what I cared about most was cracking the window after dark and then piling on as many afghans and quilts as I could to avoid freezing while I fell asleep listening to the wood stove, so that the cries of birthing would wake me in the middle of the night so that I could jump out of bed and into rubber boots and a coat and run shivering outside, cracking three-inch ice crystals under my feet, running, running out to the kidding pens on the edge of the pasture to go help new things be born. Sometimes while it snowed.
Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (I earn a royalty because I wrote the books – but as Amazon also provides me with a small commission when you click the links above, I’m required to say something here about that and let you know. I hope you will get the books and really enjoy them.)
When I am old, I aspire to have the spirit and mindset of Bilbo Baggins in Rivendell, in The Fellowship of the Ring (the book). As I came into life with neither Baggins-level wealth nor Took-level lineage, I will not have either his affluence nor his influence (unless some wandering wizard interrupts my life at age fifty and sends me catapulting my way into quite unexpected adventure), but I aspire to have his spirit.
Bilbo in Rivendell is retired and spends a fair amount of time sitting by a fire, thinking and talking, but he is also still crafting songs and stories and trying to finish a book. When he discovers that the battles of the past are not over—indeed, that the battles yet to come are far worse and that more is at stake even than in his own time—he does not hesitate to stand up and offer to do the work, feeling a sense of personal responsibility: “Bilbo the silly hobbit started this affair, and Bilbo had better finish it, or himself.” He is ready to go to Mordor if need be; he does not shy away from the work to be done to keep the Free Peoples free; he does not use either his age or his retirement as an excuse. At the same time, when he is asked to take a back seat and told that the work must be led and completed by a younger generation, he doesn’t protest that either; instead, he simply does what he can to help. He gives Frodo the blade he once used, and armor to protect him, and a bit of gentle advice: when Frodo is concerned that he will look ridiculous in a mail shirt, Bilbo says: Oh yes, I thought that at first, too. But here, put it on and put your regular clothes on over it. I’ll sleep better knowing you’re safer, and anyway it’s better to look ridiculous but be safe than look good and get stabbed by a Ringwraith.
Bilbo’s advice and his tales are sought after, and he is ready to share his learning with the young and mentor when needed; yet he himself is also quick to listen attentively to the adventures and experiences of the young; he knows they live in a different world than the one he once roamed across; they will “see a world” he “will never know.” He is proud of the deeds of his own life (except a few he is ashamed of and brings himself at last to confess), but he doesn’t have any illusions that those deeds have fixed everything up or that the young should be grateful. He sees the young as fellow adventurers. “Don’t adventures ever have an end?” he wonders, realizing that the story keeps going. He also confronts and takes ownership of how his deeds (the finding of the Ring) have also made matters worse. “I understand,” he says sadly, and then considers how to help.
Bilbo has no hesitation being his own eccentric self; he doesn’t tone himself back. He has eleventy-one years and then some of sass stored up, and a bit of productive mischief too, but he is also kind. He comes from a culture where, if you have a day celebrating yourself, you celebrate by giving other people gifts. He isn’t particularly fond of some of his relatives, but he doesn’t appear to hold many prejudices. He is willing to point out others’ prejudices, gently but firmly; he takes Lindir to task for not being able to tell the difference between a Man and a Hobbit (all you mortals, Lindir says, look alike). To Bilbo, encountering different folk is an opportunity to hear a new story or a new song. If Elves, Dwarves, and Men are at each other’s throats, he is likely to attempt a bit of diplomacy at cost to his own position and safety (as in the incident of the Arkenstone near the end of The Hobbit). Even Gollum, who he finds scary (given Gollum’s intention to eat him), he responds to with wariness and pity rather than hatred, and he navigates that intense encounter with all the cunning (and luck) he can find but also by means of what common ground they can discover: a shared delight in riddles.
Bilbo is fond of his country and his own people and eager for news of them after being away, but he doesn’t experience anything like patriotism or nationalism. He acknowledges (with that glint of mischief in his eye) that he likes less than half of his neighbors half as well as he’d like to, and likes less than half of them half as well as they deserve. But he is fond of them all the same, even if sometimes impatient with them in his age and eager for a break.
Bilbo’s loyal to his friends, and he is also willing to let go of the past when needed. But he remembers (and tells) the stories of his past; he knows who he is. At the same time, he regards the future as a set of marvelous unpredictabilities; the moment you set foot on the road, you don’t know where it may carry you. Life is an adventure, and so just as there may yet be more suffering in it, there is always something new to experience and learn, too; “in every wood in every spring / there is a different green.” As Frodo prepares for departure to Mordor, Bilbo asks him to bring back any stories and songs he hears; he knows Frodo will encounter peoples that are different and that Bilbo himself can barely imagine, and Bilbo would love to hear what stories they tell about who they are. The road to Mordor may be scary, but all Bilbo can think of is all the people one might meet along the way.
Old Bilbo is a good storyteller and an eager listener to others’ tales. Bilbo Baggins in Rivendell is the kind of older storyteller I would like to one day be.
Stant Litore
Want more from me on the power of hearing and telling stories? Check out the book On the Other Side of the Night. It’s a love letter to science fiction and fantasy, and it’s also a story about growing together as readers, and it’s about the relationship between imagination and kindness. You can find it here: https://stantlitore.com/product/otherside/ Or here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1732086990
Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (I earn a royalty because I wrote the book – but as Amazon also provides me with a small commission when you click the link above, I’m required to say something here about that and let you know. I hope you will get the book and really enjoy it.)
Image credit at top of post: Rivendell by J.R.R. Tolkien. Property of the Tolkien Estate.
The Litore Toolkits for Fiction Writers are fast-paced, practical, no-fluff workshops-in-a-book to help you push your craft to the next level. So far the series includes:
Other volumes are planned for future years but are not yet in the works, including Write Dialogue Your Readers Won’t Forget, and Write Action Scenes Your Readers Won’t Forget, and Write Imaginary Creatures Your Readers Won’t Forget.
Reviews for Stant Litore’s Previous Toolkits for Fiction Writers
“Not only is the advice great, but there’s a warmth to the chapters that makes writing inviting rather than intimidating.” – Todd Mitchell, author of The Traitor King and The Last Panther
“There are other worldbuilding books out there; this is the one you want.” – Travis Heerman, author of the Ronin trilogy
“A master class: Litore has created an accessible, comprehensive approach.” – S.G. Redling, author of Flowertown and Damocles
“This is a clear, comprehensive, and beautifully written guide that will not only help emerging writers to find their voices and build imaginative worlds and characters, but one that will also prove invaluable to experienced writers seeking to spark their creative impulses or deepen the worlds they create.” – Angela Mitchell, author of Falada and Dancing Days
“Learning to write fiction that moves readers is a lifelong pursuit, but successful writers often struggle with showing others how they do it. For that, you need a good teacher. Stant Litore is an extraordinary teacher, and in Write Stories Your Readers Won’t Forget he shares what he knows in clear, practical and profound chapters. Packed with insight, examples, and exercises, Stant’s book will cut years off your learning curve.” – James Van Pelt, author of Pandora’s Gun
I’m so delighted to let you know that a new masterclass-in-a-book from Stant Litore is out in both kindle and paperback editions: Write Descriptions Your Readers Won’t Forget. Get your copy today – and if you order directly through this website, consider leaving a tip to help as I build out the rest of the Litore Toolkits for Fiction Writers!
Cover art by Lauren K. Cannon.
Excite your reader on every page. Vivid description isn’t a static listing of attributes; instead, it’s the live wire that runs through every scene in your story, and both information and emotion travel to the reader along that hot current. It’s how you make both a character’s exterior world, their interior emotional life, and specific interactions between the two vivid and unforgettable. Good description is electric, and it shocks sleepy readers awake. It helps us sit up with a gasp and pay attention.
In 30 exercises, discover an entire toolkit for electrifying your prose and master fresh strategies for describing characters, settings, emotions, and actions in ways that leave the reader breathless.
“Not only is the advice great, but there’s a warmth to the chapters that makes writing inviting rather than intimidating.” – Todd Mitchell, author of The Traitor King and The Last Panther
“There are other worldbuilding books out there; this is the one you want.” – Travis Heerman, author of the Ronin trilogy
“A master class: Litore has created an accessible, comprehensive approach.” – S.G. Redling, author of Flowertown and Damocles
“This is a clear, comprehensive, and beautifully written guide that will not only help emerging writers to find their voices and build imaginative worlds and characters, but one that will also prove invaluable to experienced writers seeking to spark their creative impulses or deepen the worlds they create.” – Angela Mitchell, author of Falada and Dancing Days
“Learning to write fiction that moves readers is a lifelong pursuit, but successful writers often struggle with showing others how they do it. For that, you need a good teacher. Stant Litore is an extraordinary teacher, and in Write Stories Your Readers Won’t Forget he shares what he knows in clear, practical and profound chapters. Packed with insight, examples, and exercises, Stant’s book will cut years off your learning curve.” – James Van Pelt, author of Pandora’s Gun
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stant Litore is the author of the nonfiction titles Lives of Unforgetting and On the Other Side of the Night, and the fiction titles Ansible, The Zombie Bible, Dante’s Heart, and The Dakotaraptor Riders. Best known for his weird fiction, alternate history, and science fiction, he holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Denver (as Daniel Fusch). He has served as a developmental editor for the independent writers’ collaborative Westmarch Publishing, and his work on character development has been featured in Jeff Vandermeer’s Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction. Litore’s fiction has been acclaimed by NPR, has served as the topic for scholarly work in Relegere and Weird Fiction Review, and he has been hailed as “SF’s premier poet of loneliness.” He is fascinated by ancient languages, history, and religious studies. He does not currently own a starship or a time machine but would rather like to. He lives in Colorado with his three children and hides from visitors in the basement library beneath a heap of toy dinosaurs, tattered novels, comic books, incomprehensibly scribbled drafts, and antique tomes. He is working on his next novel, or several.
He has taught these classes for Clarion West, Pikes Peak Writers Conference, Writing the Other, Apex Writers, Castle Rock Writers Conference, and other professional events for fiction writers.
We take it for granted that the heart is the seat of the emotions. But to ancient peoples in the Mediterranean world, you felt powerful emotions in your gut. In the very bowels of your being. That was where fear twisted you in knots. That was where rage kindled its dark flames. And that was nearer… (well, nearer than the heart, anyway) …the location where desire blossomed in all its heat. We typically sanitize ancient texts in translation by changing ‘bowels’ or ‘viscera’ to ‘heart’ when the topic on the page is powerful emotion, so that we can read without imagining our heroes and heroines suffering bowel movements whenever they are furious, joyous, or passionate. But when Zechariah sings his beautiful Benedictus at the birth and naming of his son, John the Baptist, he rejoices that “through the guts of the mercy of our God,” his people will be saved.
And when the betrothed in The Song of Songs says that her lover “put his hand at the hole in my door, and my heart was moved for him,” that’s not quite what the poem says. A door is assumed because the beloved was just knocking, but when the young lover says simply that her beloved put his hand at her opening, you are meant to read it in an erotic sense, as well. The whole passage teases like that. And it wasn’t her heart that was moved, but her guts, her insides. The oldest English translations use “bowels,” but bowels are no longer as sexy as they once were (and no matter how passionate and overpowering the bowel movement may be, the bowels don’t get any sexier to us).
Many things about the body were once sexier than they are now. For the Romans, an intensely erogenous zone was the space between the nose and the upper lip. And when youths in the 13 Colonies would ride to join General Washington, their sweethearts would rub an apple in their armpit and give it to them so they could take some of their lover’s scent with them on the road. Or the soldier would leave a similar apple behind for the lover remaining at home. A freedom apple.
Tl;dr: Armpits used to be romantic and guts used to be sexy. And if we realized just how much we take for granted about the way we think and talk about our bodies, we would be moved and would suffer quaking in the very bowels of our being.
“Write the story you’ve always wanted to write. Stant Litore’s third toolkit for writers will empower you to sharpen your story’s thematic intensity. Theme is your answer to the question, Why does this story matter? Why does this story matter to each of your characters, and why does it matter to you? Why this story? What hold does it have on your heart? If you find the most compelling answer to that question – and then write that answer into every scene in your book – you’ll have a story that will matter to readers, too.
“This toolkit provides a sequence of 30 story-building exercises plus guidelines on how to craft a thematic outline for your story and use it as a potent tool for revision. In these pages, explore how character, theme, and plot interact; how what matters most in your story gets expressed through each character’s unique voice and gets performed dramatically through your plot; and discover how a mastery of theme can help you establish a powerful threshold text to begin your story, solve ‘the saggy middle,’ and deliver a denouement that your readers will never forget.”
Hello writers, readers, storytellers, and people who love tales and sagas of every kind: I am very excited to let you know that I am releasing a third toolkit for writers, entitled Write Stories Your Readers Won’t Forget. The kindle edition is available for pre-order now, and this unique class-in-a-book, from the creator of the acclaimed courses Write Characters Your Readers Won’t Forget and Write Worlds Your Readers Won’t Forget, will be released on February 24. Come pre-order it today!
From the back cover: “Write the story you’ve always wanted to write. Stant Litore’s third toolkit for writers will empower you to sharpen your story’s thematic intensity. Theme is your answer to the question, Why does this story matter? Why does this story matter to each of your characters, and why does it matter to you? Why this story? What hold does it have on your heart? If you find the most compelling answer to that question – and then write that answer into every scene in your book – you’ll have a story that will matter to readers, too.
“This toolkit provides a sequence of 30 story-building exercises plus guidelines on how to craft a thematic outline for your story and use it as a potent tool for revision. In these pages, explore how character, theme, and plot interact; how what matters most in your story gets expressed through each character’s unique voice and gets performed dramatically through your plot; and discover how a mastery of theme can help you establish a powerful threshold text to begin your story, solve ‘the saggy middle,’ and deliver a denouement that your readers will never forget.”
Stant litore puppes – “the ships stand at the shore.” The meaning behind my pen name is the story that beats at the heart of every work of fiction or nonfiction I’ve written. The city may be in flames behind you and you may be fleeing in the night, but ahead of you, someone is calling back, “Hurry! Hurry! The ships stand at the shore! The anchors are already up!” Once you embark on the wine-dark sea during your dark night, you can’t know where the waves will take you or what awaits you on the further shore. Perhaps you’ll find a new home. Perhaps you’ll found Rome. Ash is fertile, and forests grow from battlefields.
I invite you to come explore both my alien, fictional worlds and the nonfiction in which I take ancient texts and make them strange again. Great reads await.
Stant Litore
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The story of Samuel as a child has always moved me. God calls Samuel in the middle of the night, calling his name in the dark, and little Samuel says, “Hineni – here I am!” And he gets up and goes running to Eli, the priest who takes care of him, thinking Eli has called him. And Eli, old and blind and very weary, keeps telling him, “I didn’t call you, Sammy; go back to bed!” And this keeps happening. And I love that story, both because Eli and Samuel are so human in it – the child waking up repeatedly in the middle of the night and running to your bedside, and the old man groaning like Samuel L. Jackson (“go the f to sleep!”) and because of what it suggests about what God sounds like. When God really has something to say, he doesn’t sound like the thundering voice that televangelists, radio show talk hosts, and other pundits like to talk about. He doesn’t sound High and Almighty and wrathful in a way that Americans would recognize. He sounds like a dad (and specifically the kind of dad that a child would run to eagerly after waking from sleep). Quiet, intimate, not a windstorm or an earthquake but a small voice calling your name. I love that story. It’s the first story I ever learned in sunday school as a child, and it’s truer than many tales I’ve been told about my God by others since.
“I have learned that hope, which I had thought small and delicate like a moth in the night, can be hard as steel, a blade inyour hand.”
Lives of Unstoppable Hope is a tale of fathers and daughters, of a genetic condition so rare that only a handful of other children in my country have been diagnosed with it, and of unconquerable spirit and of spirit that conquers. I hope you’ll pick up a copy. Today, against all odds, my Inara is ten years old, and she is magnificent.
“Peace’s sister is justice.” Here is why we get ‘peace’ wrong – and why making peace (real peace) is about storytelling and story-hearing.
(Transcript of the image: “You keep pairing me with quiet,” Peace said, “but my true companion is the mighty clamor of chains being ripped clean from the wall.” – Lort Hetteen.)
Peace’s sister is justice:
“Peace was more than stillness. More than sleep. More than numbness, more than the absence of conflict. Peace was consolation and wholeness. Peace was two men breaking bread together, forgiving an old quarrel. Peace was a mother holding her infant up to its father for the first time, or a mother opening her eyes to greet her child after long illness. Peace was two lovers in each other’s arms after a long, good night. Peace was an open door and a wall torn down.”
Here is why we think of peace as quiet, when it is anything but:
“The word ‘eirene’ in Koine Greek is profoundly different from ‘peace’ in English, to such an extent that when we translate it as ‘peace’ and read it in an English New Testament, we may read from the text a meaning opposite to that a first-century Christian would have. Consider what we often mean when we say ‘peace’ in English. We tell our dead to rest in peace, we ask for peace and quiet, we ‘make peace’ by ending a battle—because our ‘peace’ is a descendant of the Roman ‘pax,’ which means the absence of conflict. It means order, silence. Yet for many, the Pax Romana was a false peace and an oppression. The Greek word is ‘eirene,’ which comes from the verb eiro, which means to tie or weave. An appeal to eirene is not a call for order or the cessation of conflict; it is a call for interdependency—for a community ‘woven together.’ In a perfectly ordered pax, in a stable status quo with no conflict, people may find themselves stacked on top of each other in orderly castes and not woven together at all; lives may be prevented from full-flourishing because privileging the absence of conflict above all else keeps issues from being resolved, reconciled, or forgiven. But in eirene, we don’t silence dissent or brush issues and conflicts under the rug—*we* are the rug. Woven together in community like a thousand colored threads in a brilliant tapestry. … Rather than resting on top of each other in separate layers of society, the writers of the Greek New Testament imagined an integration of all people into the warp and weft of a shared community.”
We need more of that kind of peace. That is the peace I will pray for, yearn for, fight for, and try always, with my stories, to weave. The quote is from Lives of Unforgetting: What We Lose in Translation When We Read the Bible, which you can get here: https://stantlitore.com/product/unforgetting/ Or on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07NTRT4DP People who have read it call it a must-read.
Real peace requires hearing everyone’s story, and creating the conditions in which everyone’s story can be heard. One more quote on peace and justice, from a novel:
“For Dmitri, raised by Ticktocks and abandoned by Ticktocks, justice was an objective thing. Your clock tells wrong or it tells right. Sometimes, the universe’s clock is off the hour and has to be set right. Everything must be counted and accounted for, especially blood spent and spilled. But Katya and I are of the humming people. For us, justice is not a matter of the hours told right but of songs finished, melodies made complete, tales that reach satisfying ends, and no teller’s tale ending too soon. My Mom’s tale ended too soon. No matter how hard the story, you don’t give up until it’s told. When you see another trying to sing and they can’t, you help them. If someone has no voice, you help them make a drum and you learn sign. If someone is captive, slaved by raiders, you break their bonds, take the gag from their mouth, and get them out into the free prairie where they can sing again. If red rain falls, you get everyone under shelter where the hum of their heartbeats can continue, however frightened and quick. You never give up, just as the Founder herself never gave up. You sing and you love and you hum with life until your very last breath, and you do what you can so others get to breathe and sing, too, until all our tales and all our lives are braided together.”
It takes place on the planet Peace, which is not a quiet planet.
Stant Litore
P.S. If you have been loving my work, whether the fiction or the nonfiction, please come support my work on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/stantlitore A membership at a very small amount gets you a lot of great reads, and it helps me do more of this. The stories we tell are how we weave peace, and I hope mine will do a small part in that. Come join me. I could use the help, and you could use the stories.
One day, I am going to write the version of the Exodus story in which Egypt, rather than being plagued by millions of tiny frogs, is hit by one giant, hungry, Kaiju Frog. Leaping past the pyramids at Giza and alarming the night with its thunderous croak! Hopping to crash into the roof of Pharaoh’s palace, mistaking the sun-heated brick for a colossal lilypad. Long-tongued, slurping up citizens like flies.
(This post brought to you because a friend reminded me of how in Hebrew, the singular rather than the plural is used for the Plague of Frog.)
Stories give us opportunities to explore our instinctive responses to the other; vicariously, we discover opportunities to either welcome or reject the marvelous encounter with the other. Which we choose is then a matter of how limited or expansive our imagination might be. Like Lovecraft, we might stop at fear, or like Borges, we might hold all possibilities in magnificent tension, open our eyes, and say, “Well met by moonlight, stranger.”
That is a gift—one of seven gifts that speculative fiction has for us in this dark hour. Often sold at bookstores as “science fiction and fantasy,” sometimes as horror, sometimes snuck into the shelves of “literary” fiction, speculative fiction simply means wonder stories. Fiction that speculates, that asks improbable questions, that indulges curiosity, that climbs back down the ladder to look at the strange thing that is approaching from behind, to face it without fear, to face it like Theseus facing the King Horse, holding out a lump of salt. These are the stories we need right now, and I want to talk with you about why, and what healing and opening of our hearts and imaginations might be possible if we allow it. We live in a time when we are being asked to accept stories told by people whose hearts are famished and grinchlike, stories that make us smaller; we are in such need of stories that make us bigger, stories that empower us to imagine larger worlds than the cages we have been constructing for ourselves. Stories that help us imagine that the fence between us and the other is no insurmountable barrier, and that all the fences and all the walls between us and our many kindred on this earth are unworthy of our respect, that we needn’t heed them, that it is better to break them, or tumble them, or clamber over them with a canteen of water, with a blanket to offer warmth, with ears ready to hear another’s story.
This week’s read for me is The Night Land, which I last read ten years ago, and previously, ten years before that. That novel, published in 1912, was incredibly formative for me, and I have never read another book that rivals it for extravagance and scope of imagination; in that respect, it dwarfs later science fiction and fantasy. Tolkien and Lovecraft and early sword and sorcery pulp writers all borrowed a great deal of imagery and mood from it; Minas Morgul is the House of Silence rebuilt, and the volcanic and ashen desolation of Mordor owes much to the magma-lit and poisoned emptiness of the Night Land, and the chill dread of the Ringwraiths to Hodgson’s silent Shrouded Ones; Lovecraft’s more abstract horrors are the love-children of Hodgson’s pneumavores and the alien gods of late nineteenth-century horror, and the mood of cosmic, existential horror is something he gets directly from Hodgson, who was less racist than H.P. (by a lot) and probably more sexist; Conan and Jirel of Joiry both fought the offspring of the Night Land’s monsters; Gene Wolfe and Jack Vance both wrote their own night lands in response. The Night Land stands in the distant past of the genre like the Watching Thing in its own pages: grotesque, immense, unmoving, a brooding presence watching a tortured landscape.
The Night Land is both obnoxiously brilliant in its imagination and command of mood, and obnoxiously bad in its treatment of its characters. It is also famously difficult to read, though I think that difficulty is overstated; I personally don’t mind baroque and archaic prose at all, but then, I am an odd duck who once wrote a dissertation on Shakespeare and seventeenth century drama, and who gets more joy out of Homer and Sappho than Hemingway or Heinlein or Asimov.
No, the flaw isn’t really the prose; it’s the author’s shipwrecked commitment to writing an erotic story in the second half of his fantasy novel, impaired by a complete inability to do so. He has a thirteen-year-old Edwardian-era virgin’s idea of how to write a woman or scenes of romantic love, and those parts are just obnoxiously bad. Really obnoxiously bad. His hero and heroine are intended to have a BDSM relationship, but while in another writer’s hands that would be romantic and exciting, in William’s hands… well, there’s only so many pages of ‘she giggled and was most full of Naughtiness, and I did spank her again, as you will understand surely’ that a reader can take.
So I don’t usually recommend The Night Land as a read for my readers, but I mention it as a key influence on the worlds and mood in my fiction. It was the first of the ‘dying earth’ genre, and as a younger writer I wanted to create stories in the dark world of The Night Land, where, millions of years in the future, the Last of Humanity (consisting of the survivors and descendants of every culture on earth) hold cosmic horrors at bay with only heroism, love, and spinning saws that flare and flash in the dark. So in 2014 I wrote Ansible 15715 as a kind of fan fiction (an origin story about the arrival of the pneumavores on our earth); then I wrote another story, and another. And if The Night Land tells the middle of the story of that far-future world, the Ansible Saga — Ansible: A Thousand Faces, consisting of ten episodes ranging from short story to novel in length — dissects and retells the middle and adds the origin and also the story of its end (and new beginning).
Ansible is an elegy for humanity as well as a horror fiction and a love story, and ultimately, against all odds, a tale of the possibility and triumph of love of the other. Like Hodgson’s original, it becomes, midway through, a love story charged with romance, but here the patriarchal power-fantasy hero-telepath and his inexplicably vapid spankette are replaced by a time traveling, shapeshifter, hijabi heroine-telepath and the bi, lesbian, and pan women who love and are loved by her across millons of years of the defense of humanity and across transitions between bodies, species, and worlds. But the mood is intact, and the theme of love and courage when faced with what absolutely appears to be the final dark, in a tale that pendulum-swings between the extremes of utter and irrevocable loneliness and scenes of human intimacy that can survive any nightfall. Like the villain of Ansible 15718 (the fifth of the ten chapters in Ansible), in writing this saga, I devoured what I loved (The Night Land) and took up residence inside its shell and carcass — but I hope that, like the heroines of Ansible, I sung such a song of fresh beauty inside that shell. It is, though, ultimately less fan fiction than a fan-hijacking, where The Night Land becomes a chrysalis for a new tale that nonetheless consists chemically of all the ingredients of the original.
Now Ansible: A Thousand Faces is finished, and has been finished for eleven months. You can find it here: https://stantlitore.com/product/ansible-thousand-faces/ I think it’s my best work. (So far.) If Jurassic Park inspired (at a distance) my dinosaur fiction, and The Night of the Living Dead provoked my Zombie Bible, The Night Land became the rough map across which my Ansibles traveled. It’s The Night Land reimagined from another century’s perspective (our own).
Now I return to read The Night Land a third time, in all its beauties and its awfulness too. I read it for the high-voltage charge it gives to my imagination, making ideas explode in the sky of my mind like dying stars. Again I will curl up in a blanket on the barren Downward Slope with X, alone in a world of total darkness, listening in the terrible silence for the faint, longing telepathic call of the beloved, somewhere out there across the emptiness of a dead world; again I will peer out through the telescopes mounted above humanity’s last library; again I will gaze up in wonder at a crashed spaceship, derelict on a tower of rock for four million years, a relic of humanity’s voyages; again I will stand on the decks of the walking cities, following the dying sun forever westward during the long centuries of the earth’s slowing rotation. And who knows what ideas will drive me to my notebook to scribble and sketch and muse, this time.
I would like to think, maybe a little arrogantly – or maybe just hopefully – that my own Ansible: A Thousand Faces will have that very effect on some other readers and writers, while proving considerably less difficult to read. From the beginning of the earth to the end of the universe and beyond, from a telepathic gift to the australopithecines to a pitched battle in a future of forever night, from a medieval library (in what’s now Uzbekistan) to an alien planet of rain forests populated by sentient trees, Ansible is my imagination run loose and amuck, with all of time and space as its canvas, and I hope you will enjoy the story, which is about the story of humanity as an ever-changing and neverending song, endlessly varied yet woven on one chorus of hope and community, through all of time. And I think you may fall in love with Sahira and Rasha and the Sentinel of the Night Land and their companions. They have quite a story to share with you.
Stant Litore
P.S. You can find The Night Land everywhere; it is 109 years old and public domain. There is also a fandom site for it — https://nightland.website/index.php/artwork/image-galleries — with fan fiction and art depicting The Night Land. A little music, too.
Hi everyone! I want to ask you to check out my science fiction and fantasy audiobooks, because they’re amazing. They’re read by star narrator Amy McFadden (and a couple by the talented Laila P and Yi Ming Sofyia Xue), and they include:
A novella about a young woman in the Bronze Age fleeing her father and the hungry dead through ravines by starlight in the Middle East
The first Dakotaraptor Riders novel! (Looking for a thrilling tale with lesbian dakotaraptor riders, were-brachiosaurs, Slavic witches, triceratops cowboys, carnivorous cacti, and invaders with machine guns mounted on deathreaper tyrannosaurs? I’ve got you covered.)
Starting this year, I will also be releasing some additional audiobooks read by me. In the docket: Lives of Unforgetting; the rest of The Zombie Bible; Dante’s Heart; Dante’s Rose; Lives of Unstoppable Hope; On the Other Side of the Night; Write Characters Your Readers Won’t Forget; Write Worlds Your Readers Won’t Forget. Now that the house isn’t burning down or flooding and my children are safely out of the hospital, I’ll be resuming audiorecording in my home studio tonight. Meanwhile, come listen to the twelve audiobooks that are already up! They are adventures you’ll never forget.
(Nothing in this excerpt will surprise my Jewish readers, but I wish more of my other readers knew! tl;dr: The Hebrew “eshet chayil” in Proverbs 31 does not mean “virtuous woman” in the modern sense, far from it. It means “woman of valor” or daring woman.)
Proverbs 31, from a Hebrew wisdom text, has been treated as one basis for defining “family values” in some Christian communities in the U.S., and has frequently been put to the purpose of subjugating women and validating rigid gender hierarchy. In most Christian translations of Proverbs 31, men are told to praise and admire “the virtuous woman” or “the good woman” (or, in a few versions, the “capable woman” or the “capable wife”). But the Hebrew eshet chayil does not mean “virtuous woman.” It means “woman of valor.” (Jewish translations into English, such as the JPS, get this right.)
In his annotations to The Hebrew Bible, Robert Alter parses the word like this: “…vigor, strength, worth, substance. It is a martial term transferred to civic life.” He also notes the word shalal (“prize, loot”) in the line that follows: “The heart of her husband trusts her / and no prize does he lack” (Proverbs 31:11). It is as though the woman of valor is being compared to a victorious warrior returning home with spoils after war. (In fact, in this metaphor, the husband is the one awaiting the spoils-laden return of the warrior who has his heart; the gender roles a modern reader would expect are flipped.)
In our English Bibles, we often get “virtuous,” “good,” or other adjectives suggestive of moral character because the translation committee commissioned by King James I four centuries ago translated eshet chayil in this way. Because that Authorized Version became our sacred text, future committees have dutifully followed suit. But in the seventeenth century, the word “virtuous” made somewhat more sense; the Victorians hadn’t yet gotten their hands on the word (and wouldn’t for another 250 years). At the time, “virtuous” still suggested the Italian virtù, meaning manliness, purposeful action, and bravery—not moral purity or goodness. Vir is Latin for “man,” and we get from it not only the English word virtue but also virility. The “virtuous woman” in Proverbs 31 is the very same woman whom the King James translation tells us is clothed “in strength and honor,” like a warrior (Proverbs 31:25).
However, the Hebrew eshet chayil doesn’t suggest manliness or masculinity. It suggests valor. The woman of Proverbs 31 is brave, persistent, audacious, resourceful, and ready for anything. In that chapter, we find her running a business. We find her planning for the future, charting a course toward her dreams. A more apt translation of eshet chayil into contemporary English may well be “a daring woman.” Or at least, we could adopt the Jewish translation and go with “valorous woman”; it is far more accurate.
What I want us to notice is the wide gap between the “daring,” bold woman and the “virtuous,” well-behaved woman. This gap persists in our modern Bibles for two reasons. First, the fact that the meanings of many words have shifted dramatically over the past four hundred years, so that words that meant one thing to the readers of King James’ 1611 Authorized Version often convey something completely different to us now. Second, we bring with us into the Bible, eisegetically, a bias from our own culture and our religious tradition, an expectation that in those pages we will find meek, submissive women—and instructions for women to be subservient beings. In reality, little of that is in the text. That’s in us; we bring it with us when we translate or read the book. We insert it because we expect it. And once it’s there, it gets used within our religious communities to justify and reinforce a subjugation and marginalization of women that may be faithful to the nineteenth-century Victorian ideal of “the angel in the house” but that is unbiblical and anachronistic.
I wish to remind my fellow Christians: you and I, we did not become Christians to learn from the Victorians or to run our households in the Victorian way. That’s not why we’re here.
– Excerpt from Chapter 2 of Lives of Unforgetting: What We Lose in Translation When We Read the Bible
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